Wednesday, March 11, 2009

OH, LIGHTEN UP

Ah, global irony: even in an era where tanning has become more vogue than ever in the U.S., with the light-skinned going to great lengths to become browner, elsewhere in the world, especially Asia, the trend has been to become lighter.

PRI's The World has a good radio segment about the skin whitening craze in Asia, with the stunning statistic that 50% of women in Taiwan purchase skin whitening products and elsewhere in Asia, rates of 40% are not unusual. As the piece points out in nations such as Japan, the preference for lighter skin taps into centuries-old cultural biases but that certainly doesn't also discount the impact of a global media where Whiteness has long been a beauty norm as well.

I'm curious to see what some of long-term implications of this trend may be, for example, how it might impact the prevalence of skin disease/damage in these societies with the wholesale abandonment of the protections afforded melanin.